Poor Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief, Whose works are e’en the frippery of wit,From brokage is become so bold a thief, As we, the robb’d, leave rage, and pity it.At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean, Buy the reversion of old plays; now grownTo a little wealth, and credit in the scene, He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own:And, told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes The sluggish gaping auditor devours;He marks not whose ‘twas first: and after-times May judge it to be his, as well as ours.Fool! as if half eyes will not know a fleece From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece?

Forecasters predict a high of 59 degrees and partly sunny skies on Monday. Then it gets better: Tuesday, sunny, high of 70 degrees; Wednesday, sunny, high of 79 degrees; Thursday, sunny, high of 79 degrees; and Friday, partly sunny, high of 73 degrees.

The warm weather is unusual for Seattle. In the last 70 years, the National Weather Service at Sea-Tac Airport has recorded high temperatures of at least 80 degrees 11 times in April. The last time was 10 years ago.

There's no A/C in our apartment building (dates from 1912), it's poorly insulated so it's stuffy and drafty and any cooling in the summer or warmth in the winter that we manage to pay for leaks out immediately, and I get migraines when it's hot and bright. Joy. I guess I can always walk to the giant bright shiny air-conditioned tourist trap library.

As of Friday I am officially too fucking broke to afford my crazymeds for three months (sertraline and oxcarbazepine -- sixty bucks combined at Costco, about an hour and a half walk distant), whee. I can't afford a month's worth of generic Sudafed, either, which means I'm going to have the vertigo and sinus infections and tinnitus and face pain again. Running low on Prilosec, which I take a megadose of every day to help with chronic pancreatitis and severe GERD.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Essentially all this is crude and meaningless, and romantic love
appears as meaningless as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down
a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all
this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one
woman is alive—gray-haired, she is sitting in a box in the theatre,
quiet and majestic, and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless,
since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven,
and it would be strange not to forgive.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will
happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite
regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that
dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have,
though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not
predictable.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a
lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident
memory of the future, in Gonzalez’s resonant phrase. Optimism is
similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not
acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don’t have that memory and
that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans; hope like creative
ability can come from what the Romantic poet John Keats called Negative
Capability.

On a midwinter’s night in 1817, a little over a century before
Woolf’s journal entry on darkness, the poet John Keats walked home
talking with some friends and as he wrote in a celebrated letter
describing that walk, “several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at
once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement,
especially in Literature.… I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a
man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Among those who were confused about Jackson’s intentions [in "The Lottery"] was Alfred L.
Kroeber, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“If Shirley Jackson’s intent was to symbolize into complete
mystification, and at the same time be gratuitously disagreeable, she
certainly succeeded,” he wrote. In an e-mail to me, Kroeber’s daughter,
the novelist Ursula Le Guin, who was nineteen years old when “The
Lottery” appeared, recalled her father’s reaction: “My memory is that my
father was indignant at Shirley Jackson’s story because as a social
anthropologist he felt that she didn’t, and couldn’t, tell us how the
lottery could come to be an accepted social institution.” Since Jackson
presented her fantasy “with all the trappings of contemporary realism,”
Le Guin said, her father felt that she was “pulling a fast one” on the
reader.

I think Shirley’s use of the name Circe was to make sure that the reader understands the mythological components, just in case he hadn’t noticed. The symbols are abundant and almost playful, such as suggesting the Fool and his dog from the tarot as a previous, unsuccessful visitor. My mother took great care with the names of her characters. When their names are common, that is intentional, and when she names them Summers and Graves and Constance and Oakes she does so with much meaning.

....Shirley gives us a lot of information in few words; her images are complex and symbolic. She structured her stories with seriousness and craft. Her writing is very compact, and she does not waste words or toss things in meaninglessly. When she repeats words, it is to make certain that the reader has not somehow missed them. She expected a certain literacy from her reader, or at least the ability to pay attention, since she considered the writer and reader to be partners.

("But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. it was a
straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse
of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always
hailed to the letter ‘I’. One began to be tired of ‘I’. Not but what this ‘I’ was a most respectable ‘I’; honest and
logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that ‘I’
from the bottom of my heart. But — here I turned a page or two, looking for something or other the worst of it is that in
the shadow of the letter ‘I’ all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But.. . she has not a bone in
her body, I thought, watching Phoebe, for that was her name, coming across the beach. Then Alan got up and the shadow of
Alan at once obliterated Phoebe....")

(Also Menand is flat-out damn wrong with "Updike did avoid making Martha explicitly the basis for fictional characters" -- I read the book, and Ruth in the Maples stories is clearly Martha, and Begley himself says she's also the wife in Toward the End of Time, down to the deer-killing. Arguably, when he agreed not to write about Martha or her children, mainly because Martha's first husband threatened him with legal action, he wrote some of his worst stuff that showed his total failure of inventive power: The Coup, Brazil, Terrorist, Gertrude & Claudius, &c &c. -- And "He wanted to rescue serious fiction from what he saw as a doctrinaire rejection of middle-class life," okay fine, and his allies were "Henry Green, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, and Roth" -- SALINGER? Fellow-New-Yorker-writer disappeared-up-his-own-mystical-asshole whose character bitterly complains about psychiatrists "adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel" Salinger? That one? And I don't think Nabokov ever wrote about middle-class life, much less rejected it.)

(WTF: Updike "wanted to biopsy a minute sample of the social tissue and reproduce the results in the form of a permanent verbal artifact" like Proust, Joyce, Austen and James -- //THROWS UP HANDS)

As it turned out I did not go along on today's trip to the food bank, because something I ate yesterday -- very probably the plain PB&J sandwich that food bank offered us, and which, yes, I ate, despite not having eaten highly processed bread or peanut butter or even goddamn jam for about a year now, because I was hungry and had had a bowl of oatmeal about two hours before and was looking at a forty-five-minute-long walk back. Shortly after I got home I had some black tea (no Silk or creamer) and was rewarded with some nasty stomach cramps, severe nausea, and other stuff you don't want to hear about. Goddamn chronic pancreatitis.

-- Also: If you are ever in a position to donate to a food bank and want to know what people truly need, I will tell you right here and now: NOT BEANS. (Especially not dried beans, that shit takes fucking forever to soak.) NOT BREAD. NOT PASTA. NOT BOXES OF MAC AND CHEESE. Food banks have that shit coming out of their ears. Not potatoes either. Produce! Something green and not-too-perishable, like zucchinis or cucumbers or maybe radishes or turnips, but hell, even canned fruit or giant bags of frozen JGG crap, if the food bank takes frozen stuff. Pears! Apples! Dried cranberries! Fucking Sun-Maid raisins! But for the love of saints and little fishes, LAY OFF THE POTATOES. (We have like three big bags of them now in the cupboard, I'm not even kidding. And T's not supposed to eat a lot of carbs....) There is also the Unmade Holiday Pie syndrome, where people buy a bunch of canned cherries and canned pumpkin and horrible fake cranberry stuff, and never make the pies and the cans sit there until they get taken to the food bank. Take it from me: you help noone when you donate three cans of horrible fake cranberry goo. No one.

(Canned pumpkin actually does work for us, even tho I HATE pumpkin, because we mix it in with our cats' food to keep them regular. But somehow "here, we want to make sure your cat can poop!" doesn't seem to be the rationale behind people donating pumpkin, I would guess. Altho a dear friend of mine suggested a Keep The Cats Regular food drive would be popular....)

For years, I’ve spoken about immersing myself in the web’s ceaseless flow – of the glut of RSS feeds, the rushing stream of Twitter, or the never-ending cluster of tabs. Well-managed, that’s all and fine and good. It just takes a well-tuned ability to focus on what’s important to oneself, and quickly and efficiently cast off what is not.

But I now realize that, at least for someone like myself, that kind of decentred approach in which one is constantly left attempting to constitute a relationship to the sea of information – orienting oneself not only ideologically, but pragmatically in terms of ‘the attention economy’ – can be draining. It can be overwhelming. I’ve recently found myself paralyzed, partly because I’m always seeing so many different sides of things, but also because uttering an opinion – something I have to do to pay the bills – often takes the form of attempting to get all sides of an argument right. I find it leaves me stretched – as if I am writing as a mythical neutral character rather than myself.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Walked about 2 mi (there and back) to local produce food bank but was it worth it -- lovely red onions, nice cucumbers, some fine potatoes, real fresh (not frozen!) peas, some bread that I thought at first was just a plain white baked loaf but actually turned out to be sourdough with some beautiful seasoning -- rosemary? garlic? I do not know. It was quite a treat, which you don't expect from the food bank.

HOWEVER. I really don't know what to do with the cucumbers, aside from make uborkasaláta (Hungarian cucumber salad) out of them, and that involves all kinds of stuff I don't have and don't eat anymore anyway, like salt and sugar and white vinegar and sour cream. (Hungarians love sour cream. They put sour cream on their sour cream.) And I want to make something more substantial, not a summery salad dish. Do I bake them? Fry them? Boil them? What?

(Other stuff I do not have right now either that the online recipe sites suggest using: bell peppers, dill, tomatoes, radishes, carrots, shallots, cheese, &c &c. We're going off to another food bank in the morning which promises fresh produce, so I'm hopeful.) (I don't have any FRESH garlic and right now I am down to about the last of even the powdered garlic -- my grandmother would be so ashamed of me. //hangs head How can a Hungarian cook make dinner without garlic? It is cruel and unusual punishment!)

....Damn, real fresh peas -- not canned, not frozen -- are seriously worth eating by themselves, raw, no cooking required, or seasoning even. I did not know this.

You liked a Greek folk poem, which you said originated in the deep tradition of native Greek surrealism, and in which kisses turn lips red, and when the lips are wiped on a handkerchief the handkerchief turns red, and the handkerchief when washed in a river turns the river red, and the river running into the sea turns the sea red, and an eagle drinking red water becomes red, and the sun and the moon become red.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

We are writing about your Kindle (Moira's Paperwhite). Content is
waiting to be downloaded to your device but your Kindle does not have
enough memory space left to receive this content. To free up memory, go
to the Home screen on your Kindle to remove items you no longer need on
your device. Note that a copy of Kindle content you purchase from Amazon
is kept at the Manage Your Content and Devices page on Amazon.com. This
Amazon service securely stores all of your Kindle books and recent
issues of newspapers and magazines and allows you to retrieve them if
you have previously deleted them from your Kindle. You can also
retrieve this deleted content from "Archived Items", found on your
Kindle's Home screen.

At least my poverty means the Seattle Public Library is getting a workout!....probably their budget will be slashed soon (again), hah.

The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief, David PlanteBecoming a Londoner: A Diary, David Plante (these were next to each other on the 'Biography' shelf) (ah! browsing! how I missed you!)At Home with Beatrix Potter (nice big picture book), Susan DenyerBeatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, Linda Lear (have an e-copy of this but the hardback has some REALLY nice colour plates, esp of her artwork)The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, Jenny WoolfThe Diaries of Richard Burton, ed. Chris WilliamsDemon Camp, Jennifer Percy

....yes, I DO love reading biographies and diaries and memoirs way too much, why do you even ask.

The cats were VERY excited about the Mylar-sheathed library books. The tiny stripey one started licking a book as if it were a lollipop (she loves plastic. Anything and all things plastic), and the big fat black one whuffed around a couple before letting out some throaty trills and stropping the carpet under the books, so they jumped about. They have IMAX-level smell-O-vision, I guess.

Monday, April 21, 2014

Step 1: Go to website of person who said something bad about that thing you love.Step 2: Be obnoxious enough to get banned by repeatedly hammering the No, It Is You Who Is Intolerance point.Step 3: Go off into the night surrounded by the warm glow of self-righteousness, secure in the knowledge that you have Proven A Point On The Internet.

As hobbies go, I mean, I suppose it beats heroin. But are Scrabble or philately such boring alternatives to this? Are there no gardens to water or walks to take outside?

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Recently, the Onion spoofed an ad campaign in which Applebee’s
encouraged hipsters to visit their restaurants “ironically” and
middle-aged adults to make fun of hipsters. The parody describes four
“with it” young folks “seriously” eating their dinner at Applebee’s
while ridiculing the food, service and atmosphere. Behind them sit three
sad, middle-aged adults mocking the hipsters, sarcastically saying
“because I know who the latest bands are I am too cool to eat a
cheeseburger without making fun of it.” Neither group is genuinely happy
about their meal or station in life. The Onion’s satire points out that
irony and formality have become the same thing. At one time, irony
served to reveal hypocrisies, but now it simply acknowledges one’s
cultural compliance and familiarity with pop trends. The art of irony
has lost its vision and its edge. The rebellious posture of the past has
been annexed by the very commercialism it sought to defy.

Sue Townsend saved my life over the weekend when I binged on ALL the Adrian Mole books, altho I think I was too distressed to catalogue them, WHOOPS. (Other people express psychic distress through dirty kitchens or lapses in personal grooming; for me, it's when my bookblogging goes to pot.) The Confessions of was really a ragbag and I didn't care quite as much for the last four books (except the "Lost" 9/11 one was fantastic), but the first two are absolute gems. But even Wilderness Years, which I thought was the weakest link, had me guffawing out loud unexpectedly as no writer does other than Pratchett. (And in a way Pratchett and Townsend are similar -- the social criticism, the liberalism, the wild flights of fantasy that are carefully elaborated rather than just flung out, and therefore are irresistibly funny.) I think I'd rank them thus:

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ -- 1600 on the old SATs, all the O-levels, Olympic gold medal, however you want to put it. Amazing. How had I never read this before? But if I'd read it before, I wouldn't've been able to read it this weekend, and might have wound up a corpse being chewed on by my cats right now, dead of sheer misery.The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole -- only slightly less funny, which is even more amazing.Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years -- I might consider this a kind of weird authorial fanfic rather than the end of the series (haha, Angel series finale syndrome). WMD is a much better conclusion. That said, it is still fucking hilarious. And heartbreaking. And it is the last one! There are no more! //cries The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 -- bitterly funny.Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction -- even more bitterly funny, and then it gets you right at the end, WHAM.Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years -- I warmed up to this one after a while, and Adrian's fumbling attempts at parenting Rosie and Glenn are genuinely moving. Got pretty fucking sick of Pandora, tho.Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years -- the only book that was distinctly ehh. I didn't like the Love Interest appearing at the end, or the writing retreat, or nearly anything about it. The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole -- more a rough collection than anything else, but some bits were fun.

I also read How to Disappear Completely by Kelsey Osgood, which was amazingly awful, like a really sour, mean-spirited, unedited, overlong blog entry -- particularly when she detailed her jealousy of Marya Hornbacher not once but several times, which gave me severe second-hand embarrassment for her just reading about it. Then the back of the book informed me most of her experience as a pro writer seems to be for....blogs (Psychology Today, Random House), and much was explained. There is a book to be written about how memoirs about addiction and anorexia and alcoholism and even other diseases which don't begin with A simultaneously glorify the very illness they're supposedly proscribing. This really is not it. Not even close.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman, Alice Kessler-HarrisForty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, Janet MalcolmPlay it Again: Against the Impossible, Alan RusbridgerNothing Was the Same: A Memoir, Kay Redfield Jamison Strings Attached: One Tough Teacher and the Gift of Great Expectations, Joanne Lipman and Melanie KupchynskyA Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano, Katie HafnerThe Book of Lost Books, Stuart KellyThe Collected Poems of Denise LevertovThe Returned, Jason MottOne Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine, Brendan Reilly

....and that was just the stuff available in my dinky little local branch, I haven't even started ordering from other branches or, God help them, INTERLIBRARY LOAN yet, MWAHAHAHA.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

I want to start up a reading log again, only without the chirpy questions and dull format that made me abandon the last one, so this will be much more informal. I don't feel compelled to write up every book, or even go on for that long (HA, haha) at first. Let's see how it goes.

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, Janet Malcolm. Malcolm, like Kael or Sontag, is for me always interesting and irritating, simultaneously -- such subjective (and often wrong) judgments, rendered with Olympian conviction in clarion prose, so intelligent and so often deliberately wrongheaded. Malcolm's books have always been short yet spectacularly dense, like condensed matter, but this book is more of a falling-off: just about half of it is taken up with a pointless reprint of "A Girl of the Zeitgeist," Malcolm's adoring thirty-year-old lengthy profile of Ingrid Sischy (what everyone remembers from this piece is the flattering yet condemning description of her chopping tomatoes. Only Malcolm). It's not even updated with an epilogue (in fact, some reviewers don't seem to realize it's from 1986). There are some real gems here -- "A House of One's Own," about Vanessa Bell and her apparent melding of domesticity and pure art, "Salinger's Cigarettes," a reconsideration of Franny and Zooey, and of course Malcolm's aggravated attack on the giant Arbus retrospective (which Zoe Heller writes about amazingly, and why aren't you reading that right now?) -- but the majority of pieces don't quite come off. A pallid portrayal of Thomas Struth, now famous for photographing the Queen, and some weak, brief considerations of Gene Porter-Stratton, Edward Weston, nude photography, the Gossip Girl books (for Christ's sake) and William Shawn's son's memoir, are all jumbled together without much structural or thematic connection. The last three bits (eulogies for Shawn, Joseph Mitchell, and a very weird disavowal of autobiography) are, plainly, squibs. It's dismaying to find stuff in a Malcolm collection which would fit in one of those late everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-plus-the-plumber's-crack Updike holdalls. In fine, this isn't any better than the equally disappointing late Malcolm works, Iphigenia in Forest Hills and The Crime of Sheila McGough. But I could (and have) read the Bell and Salinger pieces over and over again. I just wish they were in a book worthy of them.

(I don't even know what to say about the title piece, it just went on forever and made no sense, and I believe it was planned that way and it's so coy and unrevealing and just....off. Everyone else loves it, apparently. Good for them. I am alone in wishing that she'd expanded the piece on Vanessa into something like Two Lives or The Silent Woman, sigh.)

The Grave Tattoo, Val McDermid. I read this mainly because Beatrice mentioned it. I had the exact opposite problem that every other critic/reader did with this book: too much modern era, not enough Wordsworth literary history! Also, the two murder storylines, in the past and the present, really didn’t have anything to do with each other at all. Nevertheless, a fun read, and much less upsetting/problematic than the Tony Hill books, none of which I am ever ever reading again (I think I got through two and a half before giving up and running screaming).

Updike, Adam Begley. I have a much longer post planned about this which I will probably never write despite having two pages of notes on it, haha! //cries -- It's a lot better than the giant Cheever and Carver biographies, which, again, everyone loved but me, in that it does attempt to show you some connection between Updike's life and art rather than just detailing how the subject was a complete asshole who, oh yeah, somehow wrote some great stuff on the side. It was quite well-written, except when the author repeatedly indulged himself in some annoying faux-Nabokovian Updike alliteration (see what I did there), and he falls down completely on the question of sexism, and is insulting about feminist critics/criticism/anything feminist. This doesn't happen until fairly late in the book, though. It's much too short and was I think written ENTIRELY without any contribution at all from Updike's second wife, but nevertheless it's still pretty good.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, Susannah Cahalan. Sadly, truly overrated. You have to hesitate about criticizing the writing style of someone who lived through major brain trauma (or at least, I do) but the accolades about how wonderful her writing was just annoyed me. Despite the hype there's no real sense of her doing "investigative reporting" on her own life, unlike, say, The Night of the Gun, because she just goes ahead and fills in chronologically with third-person perspectives mostly gleaned from her parents.

-- That's not even half of what I read but suddenly I'm very tired so I'll just wrap this up with:

I'm right now reading Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, by James L. Swanson, which took some gentle ribbing, as I recall, when it first came out for being kind of an action adventure movie of a book. It's certainly not well-written -- the style ranges from clunky to florid to pedestrian, often within the same sentence ("now that Booth had slowed down, the pain in his left leg bloomed under the moonlight....relief trickled down the wounded assassin's spine") -- but hell, I like some action adventure movies (we just saw Skyfall on Netflix streaming), and more to the point, this is one of those stories where the events themselves are so gripping the author doesn't have to do much more than just get out of the damn way. It's our great collective murder ballad, the tragic wound at the heart of our country, and probably would remain riveting even if acted out with finger puppets.

After a dear friend sent me Mona Simpson's Casebook and I was rummaging around on the internet for reviews (LOVED Anywhere But Here, heard her read from the then-just-published The Lost Father at Prairie Lights, haven't liked anything she's done since) I found Michiko Kakutani's review of A Regular Guy:

When she mentions one night that Shakespeare wasn't rich, he snaps back: ''Who remembers Shakespeare's daughter?'

I went to him – the only time I ever did – and said, ‘Please don’t start
drinking.’ And he was already well on his way, and he turned to me and
said, ‘You know, no one remembers Shakespeare’s child.’ I never asked
him again.

I would expect the famous book reviewer for, you know, the NEW YORK FUCKING TIMES to at least pick up the parallel, but I guess not. Maybe she ran out of review space.

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Have you found it possible to make a living by writing
the sort of thing you want to, and without the aid of such crutches
as teaching and editorial work? Do you think there is any place in
our present economic system for literature as a profession?

No; no living. Nor do I think there is any place in our etcetera for
"literature" as a "profession," unless you mean for professional
litterateurs, who are a sort of high-class spiritual journalist and
the antichrist of all good work. Nor do I think your implied desire
that under a "good system" there would be such a place for real
"writers" is to be respected or other than deplored. A good artist is
a deadly enemy of society; and the most dangerous thing that can
happen to an enemy, no matter how cynical, is to become a
beneficiary. No society, no matter how good, could be mature enough
to support a real artist without mortal danger to that artist.

Friday, April 11, 2014

Believe it or not, they knew about your mood long before you returned from the fridge, flopped on the couch and let out that long, beer-tainted sigh. It's another defense mechanism (notice a pattern here?) that they picked up years before they even knew of your existence. When Mom or Dad's moods started to fluctuate, bad shit happened. Over time, the kids learned that those moods always had telltale signs that predicted their eruptions. Ash that preceded the lava.

At first you take notice, even if it's subconsciously, that before Dad explodes, he starts rubbing his temples. Big, obvious things like that. But over time, you can't help but pick up on more subtle signs. He lets out a very soft sigh when it's going to be just a quick stick-and-move belittling session. He fidgets with his lighter when it's going to be a really bad one. The skill is developed so that when you see it happening, you can either brace yourself for the train wreck, or you can make yourself scarce so you don't have to deal with it.

Just like any skill, the more you use it, the better you get. Over the years, it becomes so woven into the fabric of your personality, you couldn't remove it without completely breaking down who you are as a person and rebuilding the cloth from scratch. So it's rarely ever a case of the person just trying to smother their partner with attention out of some sense of insecurity. It's force of habit. Alarms are going off in their subconscious that shit is about to hit the fan, and they need to defuse that bomb before it goes off. And anything can trip the alarm. The slightest change in tone of voice. The most subtle shift in eyebrows before you speak. The way you're standing. A simple change in your daily routine. The subtle way you look them in the eyes and say, "I'm about to physically punch you directly in the face with my fist. Here I go."

It sounds like a damn superpower, but it can be a real problem in relationships, because the constant questioning and attempts to fix the other person's bad mood can be suffocating. Every person needs to be allowed room to vent their stress and frustrations, but that thought scares the ever-loving shit out of the person who lived through a dysfunctional family. Because he's used to those very things being followed by aggression and hate.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Thursday, April 3, 2014

It makes me sad to think about how much I became a ghost in my circle of
friends in the last few years. Group dinners, vacations, brunches,
shopping trips, nights out at bars and clubs just became less and less a
part of my existence until most of the time nobody really bothered to
try to include me. I never blamed any of my friends for that; you can
only decline invitations because you're literally too poor to
participate for so long until people just stop asking. I'm lucky, or
perhaps unlucky enough depending on how you look at it, to have some
incredibly successful friends who worked really hard and put in the
effort to become very well paid in their respective jobs. It's not so
much that you envy your friends' success or are jealous of them, it's
more that being around people who you consider your peers who all
managed to "make it" when you yourself continually stumble and fall
makes you question whether you really even belong with that crowd. Being
the only fuck up in the room becomes a pretty dark cloud that you'd
rather not expose anyone to after a while.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

The reader who is outraged by being “forced” to look up an unfamiliar
word — characterising the writer as a tyrant, a torturer — is a
consumer outraged by inconvenience and false advertising. Advertising
relies on the fiction that the personal happiness of the consumer is
valued above all other things; we are reassured in every way imaginable
that we, the customers, are always right.

The idea that a work of literature might require something of its
reader in order to be able to provide something to its reader is
equivalent, in a consumer context, to the idea that a cut-price mobile
phone might require a very expensive charger in order for it to
function.

You need to go read that right now, it's awesome (even if I did get turned onto it by Sady Doyle ((she dissed BPAL and praised Hannibal in the space of like two damn days, and that was it for me and Sady Doyle, even before the "Joanna Newsom comes from Tori Amos" article)) ).

(Which is sad, because in its heyday, Tigerbeatdown was amazing. But now she's writing 'think pieces' on How I Met Your Mother and Hannibal, and....yeah. A lot of women who wrote amazing blogs in the 00's are now completely shuttering their personal sides in the twenty-teens. It's really depressing.)

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Trying to bolster the pathetic sales of his books, Scott bought all the copies he could find in Los Angeles and gave them away to friends. Almost everyone who writes about Fitzgerald mentions that during the last year of his life he sold only forty copies of his books and received a royalty of $13.13. But no one has noticed that his book sales were virtually the same at the end of the 1920s as they were at the end of the 1930s. In 1927, two years after he had published The Great Gatsby, his books earned only $153; in 1929 they earned $32. Most of his income, throughout his entire career, came from magazine stories and screenwriting, rather than book sales.

.....over 10 years ago now. Wow. (I keep thinking I should get myself a fancy-ass 10-year coin, but also feel a little superstitious about it. Also there's something a little sad about buying coins for yourself, but that's just one of the problems with being a shut-in, thank you agoraphobia.)

Also hadn't realized at the time I chose the date (no, I swear) that it was so close to Cobain's suicide. All the "holy shit, it's been 20 years" pieces make me think two things: oh God, I am so fucking old, and oh God, he was so young. He was barely twenty-seven! The baby. (Insert inevitable Lehrer's 'When Keats was my age, he'd been dead five years' gag.)

I guess it's a measure of old age that even though I know from the inside what that kind of suicidal pain feels like, it's horrifying now to imagine anyone cutting themselves off that young. But when you're that sick you can't understand that burning out and fading away are the same damn thing, in the end.

mothers and men

Hither rushed all the throng, streaming to the banks; mothers and men and bodies of high-souled heroes, their life now done, boys and unwedded girls, and sons placed on the pyre before their fathers’ eyes; thick as the leaves of the forest that at autumn’s first frost drop and fall, and thick as the birds that from the seething deep flock shoreward, when the chill of the year drives them overseas and sends them into sunny lands.